The "separated community" implied not only separation from "the world" but also the separation of church and state as a safeguard of religious liberty.
From their literal reading of the New Testament ("I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the cleverness of the clever I will thwart... Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?" I Cor. 1:21, and "... I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou has hid these things from the wise and prudent and revealed them unto babes..." Luke 10:21) came their sense of austerity from which flowed the "rejection of speculative philosophy and sophisticated theological reasoning" as well as rejection of technology -- "opposition to the achievements of the artificer, the inventor, the scientist". Indeed it was exactly the violent persecution that well-educated authorities launched against these simple Christians that made firm their theological position and made then more determined to stress the strict moral principles of the Sermon on the Mount and the "turning of the other cheek", rather than technical cunning. Therefore, they emphasized the manifestations of God "in closeness to nature, in the soil, and in the weather, among plants and animals," which were to be enjoyed and embraced.
The Anabaptists felt the fury of persecution in Europe especially for their rejecting of infant baptism, and refusal to bear arms.
"The anti-social character of these [Anabaptist] sects disturbed the Lutherans as much as the Catholics. Charles V legislated against them most rigorously. Of 877 names which appear in the Protestant martyrologies for the Low Countries, 617 of those were Anabaptists. Numerous executions took place at Louvain, Ruremonde, Masstricht, Liege, Antwerp, and Burges; The men were burned and the women buried alive. But this did not stop Mennonism and other kindred types of Anabaptism from gaining grounds... Slowly but surely the extremely simple form of Christianity, with its elementary dogmas, continued to spread. It was soon found in Prussia, in the Duchy of Holstein, in southern Russia and in England. Crossing the Atlantic it reached North America ..." (Danil-Rops, The Protestant Reformation)
The Anabaptists who come under the leadership of Jakob Amman (circa 1693), and hence were known as "Amish", migrated to America from Switzerland at least as early as 1727. They came to Pennsylvania, having selected that colony in reliance upon the pledge of religious freedom given in William Penn's "Great Law" of 1682 and the repute gained by that colony for religious freedom in actual practice. In perfect integrity, the foregoing religious beliefs, actualized in living communities, have come down to the Amish of today. To call their beliefs "non-doctrinal", or to infer that these beliefs constitute eccentric but dispensable customs, merely because they are not expressed in printed tests, decrees and regulations, is misleading. Amish "doctrine" (i.e. teaching) is supremely certain and clearly known because it is safeguarded to each generation by means of an oral tradition which contains and repeats the essential teachings. "Antiquity much preferred that which was taught from the lips of a living person and was skeptical of the written word. The same spirit prevails in much sectarian Protestantism." (See: Littell, "Sectarian Protestantism", at 76). The moral character of any "teacher" in Amish life is basic. "There is no distinct boundary between these deliberate pedagogical measures [of the oral tradition] and the teacher's way of life as a whole."
In the Amish are emphatically in the favor of education -- but and
"education for life" as seen in the terms of their religious view as to
how life should be lived and as to in the single goal of life which is
union with God. Amish education has followed in the pattern of classical
wisdom rather than technos. It has emphasized in the moral
wisdom of producing good men, rather than in the technical, which can
produce in the competent barbarian, in the intellectual rioter, in the
revolutionist, and in the criminal.
Only if it be deemed a crime to be an Amishman, or that in the Amish
should have no liberty to live in the Amish life, can it be said that
Amish education is not a real "education". In the Amish consider that in
the study of elementary reading, writing, and arithmetic has its place in
the helping a child become a participating member of in the community.
As it also has been shown in the Amish system of education beyond in the
eighth grade of "learning by doing" in the agricultural life of
crop-raising, animal husbandry, farm maintenance and management -- coupled
with living as a helping and responsible family man and neighbor in the in
the self-sustaining Amish faith community -- may be regarded as ideal
education. Surely, not all education need take place in a school. Only
those will disagree who, like in the State of Wisconsin, deny that there
can be different kinds of education, or who insist that all education must
be aimed at life goals dictated by in the state, or who demand in the
values derived from science and technology, or related to consumption and
competition, must be imposed on every child. While products of Amish
education measure up well in the certain accepted forms of standardized
testing, showing secular competence, their admirable attitudes toward
nature, in the ecology, ware, peace, violence, lawfulness, thrift, family,
marriage, hard work, and love of neighbor are in the direct outflow of
that great area of their educational formation that is religious
and concerned with in the possession of wisdom.
A society uniquely recognizes the desire of individuals at the dawn of
young manhood and young womanhood to get on with their life's work and to
be challenged by high responsibility. Adult baptism implies, for the
Amish, a time of choice, and its taking place in late adolescence accords
with that recognition. Far from being denied his rights at the coming of
adolescence, as the State of Wisconsin charges, the Amish person beings to
move rapidly into the full enjoyment of adult rights and privileges.
The action of the State directly violates Amish religious freedom through
penalizing, by criminal sanctions, the enjoyment of religious liberties
related to: Worship, parental nurture, individual choice of religion,
vocation, communal association, teaching and learning, and privacy.
The State of Wisconsin seeks to provide Amishmen with its own definition
of their religion. Carefully ignoring authoritative sources, the state bid
the Amish to get in line with that version of the Amish religion that the
State feels it can tolerate. So, for example, the State asserts:
"The Amish may establish their own secondary schools consistent with their
religious beliefs".
This, as has been seen, the Amish religion does not permit. Similarly, in lieu
of a high schooling, the state would require public high schooling. Indeed
it is because the Amish defendants in this case refused to send their
children to the New Glarus Public High School that the present criminal
prosection was instituted. But in a public high school, the Amish young person
plainly could not pursue the religious life that his faith requires. The
State, however, telescopes these claims into "the right to worship", thus
inferentially redefining the Amish religion by reducing it to one core
essential and dismissing all of the other manifestations of the Amish way
as nonessential.
It is no business of the state to define men's religions. The Petitioner
State can no more do away with an essential of the Amish religion that it
can an essential of any other religion. Surely, the State would not be
heard to redefine Orthodox Judaism so as to exclude from it the concept of
authority of the Bible. The State's contracting of the essential Amish
religion into an affair consisting of worship (with beards and buggies
perhaps thrown in) is an effort to camouflage and minimize the scope and
impact of Wisconsin's free exercise violation. The violation strikes at
the following essentials of Amish religious liberty:
The State of Wisconsin seeks to invade the privacy of the Amish, so far as
the Amish of high school age are concerned. The State makes not bones
about its desire to enter into the lives of these young people, expose
them to "worldly" education, fill up their minds with state-packaged
learning, alien to the Amish way, which (in the phrasing of the dissenting
opinion below) will "equip them for modern American life". Even the
privacy of the psyche is here threatened. Amish personalities are quiet
mannered, non-aggressive, considerate, and careful in action; they are
threatened with painful restructuring by stress upon the competition,
ambition, consumerism, and speed emphasized in the larger society. For the
State to reach into the Amish community with this sort of conscription of
minor children is plainly to enter upon the domina of privacy of the Amish
people. As has been seen, the effect will necessarily be disruptive of the
Amish community, which here seeks only protection of "conditions favorable
to the pursuit of happiness: among which is "the right to be let
alone".
What is more high schooling presents the Amish with an unacceptable value
system. Not only is this due to the very fact of "higher education", but
to numerous specifics related to the education afforded at New Glarus High
School. These pertain not only to social life, entertainment, curriculum,
and the encouraging of competition, but also to the effort of that school
to "teach values" with respect to life and moral conduct -- without,
however, offering the law of God as normative. The defense presented
testimony, moreover, as to the traumatic effect upon an Amish person of
fourteen or fifteen years of age caused by placing him or her in a high
school. After living for that period of time within the Amish community
and being completely conditioned by it, it is only logical that the most
severe disturbance and alienation will result to the Amish person from the
radical forced change of daily environment, especially at adolescence. As
the court below truly stated,
"They would experience a useless anguish in living in two worlds. Either
the education they receive in the public school is irrelevant to their
lives as members of the Old Order Amish or these secondary school values
will make life as Amish impossible."
The State nevertheless demands the obedience of the Amish. Placing all of
the foregoing considerations of religious liberty on one side of the
scale, the States say that these are outweighed by state interests so
compelling as to require conformity by the Amish. While the punishment
demanded by the State may have to be suffered by defendants, the State's
demand that they violate their religion will almost certainly be in vain.
The Amish answer to forms of legal harassment, which would force them to
violate their religion, has been to sell their farms and to remove to
jurisdictions, here or abroad, wherein hopefully they will be allowed
peaceably to follow the will of God. While such enforced exile of the
Wisconsin Amish community would constitute but one further aspect of the
State's invasion of Amish freedom, it would, if this Court sustains this
prosecution, sound the death knell, in this country, for an old,
distinctive and innocent culture. The Amish could very soon have no place
to go in this country, nowhere to be themselves, and there would take
place in America yet another tragic example of the forced extinction of a
culture. ("The whites were always trying to make the Indians give up their
life and live like white men... and the Indians did not know how to do
that, and did not want to anyway... If the Indians had tried to make the
whites live like them, the whites would have resisted, and it was the same
way with many Indians." Statement of Wamditanka, Chief of the Santee
Sioux, circa 1885, in D. Brown, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, 38
(1970).).
In 1849 Henry David Thoreau expressed a principle of justice profoundly
relevant here:
"I please myself with imagining a State at last which can afford to be
just to all men, and to treat the individual with respect as a neighbor;
Which even would not think it inconsistent with its own repose if a few
were to live aloof from it, not meddling with it, nor embrace by it, who
fulfilled all the duties of neighbors and fellow-man." Amish Education
Some contend that Amish children are consigned to a life of "ignorance"
and that the Amish do not receive an "education". But these charges depend
on definitions of education and of education's proper goals. Wisconsin
infers that only a secondary education which is aimed at fitting a person
for acceptance and "success" in the technological society -- and which
comes out of books and takes place in the school buildings -- is a genuine
education, indeed in the only education which may be constitutionally
enjoyed. But, as has been seen, Amish religious principles forbid the
"higher learning" whether in a public high school or any other high
school.Worship
Worship, in Amish life, whether for
the old or the young, is not confined to a "prayer period" or a weekly
hour of church attendance. Worship permeates Amish life, and in a variety
of forms. The Amish society is a "ceremonial community", its religious
ceremonial life being governed by the days of the week, by seasons, and by
the calendar. At the time of adolescence, the Amish young adult is growing
rapidly in the life of worship of the "ceremonial community" in which
harvesting, sewing and all daily work, learning and activity are
consciously offered in praise and love of God. If he is forced into high
schooling at this point in his life, this life or worship is very largely
ousted.Parental nurture
The Amish religion requires Amish parents to raise their children in the
Amish faith. Family life is extremely strong in the Amish community, and
the close bonds related to life, nurture and obedience between parent and
child are considered to be founded upon the Bible. The U. S. Supreme Court
has stated that "[t]he child is not the mere creature of the state; Those
who nurture him and direct his destiny have the right, coupled with the
high duty, to recognize and prepare him for additional obligations."
Pierce v. Society of Sisters, 268 US 510, 534 (1925). While the
Amish parents are in the very midst of recognizing and preparing their
children for the "additional obligations" of Amish life, the State of
Wisconsin seeks to stop these parents in their carrying out this work of
nurture, which is to them a fundamental religious obligation.Individual religious choice
Implicit in the
State's defense of its criminal prosecution is its view -- based on
nothing in the record -- that the Amish young people in question are not
able to make a real choice that they desire to follow the Amish religion
and that, for religious reasons, they feel compelled to not attend high
school. Upon the trial, the defense placed on the witness stand one of the
three Amish children here involved, Frieda Yoder, in order that testimony
representative of Amish young people of like age might be heard with
respect to whether these young men and women choose to pursue the Amish
way of life. Miss Yoder was fifteen, an age at a female in Wisconsin may
marry. She testified that she believed in the Amish religion, desired to
pursue the Amish way of life and that going to high school would be
against her religious beliefs. It is clear the one effect of enforced high
schooling of Amish young people is to violate their liberty to pursue the
Amish religion.Vocation
A unique feature of the Amish religion is that it allows of but one
vocation: farm life. To interfere with the vocation is to interfere with
the religion. The State interferes with the farming and farm life vocations
of Amish young men and women by requiring them to attend high school, this
necessarily displacing (at a vital time in this young person's development
and maturation) their vocational training in the Amish farming community.
They are thus "prevented from learning things they must know in order to
live a successful life in the Amish community." The technical skills,
attitudes toward manual work, and knowledge required to live in the Amish
community cannot be acquired in the classroom. "A boy learns to plow by
plowing, by knowing the condition of the soil, the degrees of moisture,
the weight of the horses. The temperament of the horses". (See: J.
Hostetler and G. Huntington, Children in Amish Society, 102 (1971).Communal Association
The Amish religion is a communal religion. There exists no Amish religion
apart from the concept of the Amish community. A person cannot take up the
Amish religion and practice it individually. The community subsists
spiritually upon the bonds of a common, lived faith, sustained by "common
tradition and ideals that have been revered by the whole community from
generation to generation." The Amish community remains a small brotherhood
where primary face-to-face relationships are essential. The Amish religion
requires pursuit of the simple life of the soil and mutual assistance; It
is the community that is the indispensable means for such a life. The
Amish religion requires separation from the world; this separation is made
possible only through the close, symbolic community. As expert witnesses
upon the trial showed the action of the State of Wisconsin directly
threatens the continued existence of the Amish church-community, which
will plainly not be able to sustain itself against the disruption caused
to it by the marshaling of its youth into high schools. This Court,
however, has held that there is a fundamental constitutional "freedom to
engage in association for the advancement of beliefs" NAACP v
Alabama, 377 US 288, 307 (1964), and the "[t]he the right of
'association', like the right of belief" is necessary to make the
guarantees of the First Amendment meaningful. Griswold v.
Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479, 483 (1965). In the Amish case, the right of
association is inseparable from the right of free exercise of religion and
must be deemed a part of the latter right, now directly attacked by the
State.Privacy
Closely related to the right of association is the right of privacy. The
Amish principle of separation of the self-sustaining faith-community from
the world is not base upon hatred of other human beings and arises out of
no tradition of aggressions against others, or any principle of racial
pride. It is based, rather, upon love of God and the belief that the life
of separation, as a pilgrim people, is necessary to salvation. But here
the right of privacy is also inextricably bound up with the right of free
exercise of religion, since the Amish religion cannot be lived except in
separation of the community from the world.Teaching and learning
Central to free exercise is the right of religious groups to transmit
their religious beliefs and heritage to their young. Correlative to the
right of the parent to teach his religion to his child is the right of the
child to received this religion -- a right asserted in testimony given in
this case. That the Amish religion is taught according to methods which,
in considerable part, differ from those employed by other religious
bodies, should in no sense be deemed to result in a diminution of this
liberties for Amish people. While, for many Catholics, Jews , and
Protestants religious expression in the family, attendance at a parochial
high school, or involvement in events at churn or temple are the means
whereby religion is transmitted, at the time of adolescence, through
directed participation and apprenticed community activities, in addition
to the formal religious teaching which is carried out in instruction for
baptism and in church services. The moral example of the teacher's life is
central. Thus the teaching of the Amish religion does not consist of a
weekly Sunday sermon, or morning and night prayers, or an hour of religion
class per day, or school instruction in subjects with religious insights
thrown in -- but instead, in a constant direction in a "school without
walls", of life, in its totality, to religious ends. The State of
Wisconsin would here interpose itself between parent and child in the
transmitting of a sacred deposit of the Amish religion and at a supremely
sensitive time in the life of the child when such interposition will
interrupt and thus plainly upset and supplant (perhaps permanently) the
effort to impart religion.The religious liberty invasion in sum
As all three courts in Wisconsin found, the State's action, as applied to
the Amish, plainly impinges upon the free exercise of their religion. They
face an impossible choice: To obey the State and thereby violate their
religion, or to follow their religion and thereby suffer criminal penalty.
But the action of the State entails more. The Amish religion is a single
fabric into which strands of worship, community, farm life, nature,
parental role and the role of children are inseparably interwoven with one
another, and all with the set religious teaching. The pulling out of any
one strand destroys the fabric.
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